Classification of Basal Stem Rot Disease in Oil Palm Plantations Using Terrestrial Laser Scanning Data and Machine Learning

Abstract

The oil palm industry is vital for the Malaysian economy. However, it is threatened by the Ganoderma boninense fungus, which causes basal stem rot (BSR) disease. Foliar symptoms of the disease include the appearance of several unopened spears, flat crowns, and small crown size. The effect of this disease depends on the severity of the infection. Currently, the disease can be detected manually by analyzing the oil palm tree’s physical structure. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is an active ranging method that uses laser light, which can directly represent the tree’s external structure. This study aimed to classify the healthiness levels of the BSR disease using a machine learning (ML) approach. A total of 80 oil palm trees with four different healthiness levels were pre-determined by the experts during data collection with 40 each for training and testing. The four healthiness levels are T0 (healthy), T1 (mildly infected), T2 (moderately infected), and T3 (severely infected), with 10 trees in each level. A terrestrial scanner was mounted at a height of 1 m, and each oil palm was scanned at four positions at a distance of 1.5 m around the tree. Five tree features were extracted from the TLS data: C200 (crown slice at 200 cm from the top), C850 (crown slice at 850 cm from the top), crown area (number of pixels inside the crown), frond angle, and frond number. C200 and C850 were obtained using the crown stratification method, while the other three features were obtained from the top-down image. The obtained features were then analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the dataset and increase its interpretability while at the same time minimizing information loss. The results showed that the kernel naïve Bayes (KNB) model developed using the input parameters of the principal components (PCs) 1 and 2 had the best performance among 90 other models with a multiple level accuracy of 85% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.80. Furthermore, the combination of the two highest PC variance with the most weighted to frond number, frond angle, crown area, and C200 significantly contributed to the classification success. The model also could classify healthy and mildly infected trees with 100% accuracy. Therefore, it can be concluded that the ML approach using TLS data can be used to predict early BSR infection with high accuracy.

Discovering the Ganoderma Boninense Detection Methods Using Machine Learning: A Review of Manual, Laboratory, and Remote Approaches

“…Decision tree (DT) algorithm is a supervised regression machine learning approach that splits the dataset into several tree-like models, which consist of a number of nodes for testing attributes, a number of edges for branching by the value of selected attributes, and a number of leaves for labelling classes [44].…”

“…DT was used as one of the classifiers by Husin et al [44] and achieved 80% accuracy in the four BSR level classification using the TLS data. From the result, 90% accuracy was achieved in the healthy level classification.…”

“…Discriminant analysis (DA) is a supervised classification machine learning approach that assigns observations to pre-defined groups by evaluating the differences between two or more groups of objects with regards to a few variables simultaneously [44].…”

“…The mean accuracy of QDA classification in the study was 80.79%. Husin et al [44] also used QDA on TLS data and achieved 75% accuracy in classifying four BSR infection.…”

“…Linear discriminant was applied on TLS data and 80% of accuracy was achieved in classifying multiple levels of BSR infection [44].…”